Michael Talbot

Writes Toby Johnson: When Toby Marotta
and
I first
went to New York City to see about getting Marotta's book The
Politics
of Homosexuality published we were introduced to a literary agent
named
John Brockman.Working for him as a secretary and ghost writer for
several of the new paradigm scientists Brockman represented was Michael
Talbot.

As a boy, he was the subject (source?) of a poltergeist
haunting that performed such “miracles” as raining gravel from the sky
and throwing furniture around the house, even causing small wounds to
appear on Talbot’s arms and legs.

In Beyond the Quantum, Michael Talbot hypothesized how interior
experience manifests in the outside world. He thought one of his major
contributions to the understanding of paranormal, fringe phenomena was
the notion of psychoid reality, a state of being between physical and
mental and influenceable by both.

In several books, including Mysticism and the New Physics as
well as one specifically
called The
Holographic Universe, Talbot gave a highly developed
exposition of the notions of the holographic
model and of morphogenetic fields.

Though he died in the heights of the AIDS crisis, Michael did not have
AIDS. He joked once that he'd come down with a disease that was out of
fashion.

Michael Talbot was an accomplished pianist;
below is a photo of him and a friend at the piano. Also a photo of
Michael and his boyfriend Paul.

Michael Talbot is a
great example of the gay man as mystic, visionary,
and world transformer.

Here's a link to The Holographic
Universe in a new edition with
Introduction by Lynn McTaggart. There are literally hundreds of five
star reviews.

Michael's
1982 vampire novel The Delicate Dependency has been brought back
into print by Valancourt Books in 2014. Wonderful book.

Book Description

They
are cool to the touch and alluringly beautiful in their ageless youth.
Their laughter seduces, their brilliance beguiles. They guard the
secrets of science and history, and the answers to the mysteries of
life and death lie within their vastly superior knowledge. In centuries
past, they were known as the Illuminati. They are the vampire.

Dr.
John Gladstone, a scientist in Victorian London, is thrust into their
world after his carriage runs over a young man of angelic beauty named
Niccolo. When Niccolo kidnaps Gladstone’s child and vanishes, the
doctor must go in pursuit, with the help of his daughter, Ursula, who
is enticed by the lure of eternal life, and Lady Hespeth, whose demure
exterior hides a dangerous obsession. Why are the vampires taking
children, and what is the connection to Gladstone’s experiments with a
deadly virus? And how can he possibly prevail against a race of
immortal beings with power and intelligence infinitely beyond his own?

Michael
Talbot’s The Delicate Dependency (1982) is often cited as one of the
best vampire novels ever written. This highly anticipated new edition,
the first since the book’s original publication, includes a new
foreword by Jillian Venters.

-------------------------------------------

In January of 2006, Toby Johnson came across the following article
posted on a yahoo group about the Holographic Model.
It's identified as
"author unknown."
It sounds like a summary of Michael Talbot's
thinking.On a website called Crystalinks,
the article is identified as written by Talbot.

Michael would probably
have appreciated the irony that he's become "author unknown."
—In a way
his whole vision of reality was that we are not what we seem; we are
not individual egos.—
We are all manifestations of the holographic
universe viewing itself from inside.

In addition to this article attributed to Michael, Crystalinks has a
number of other articles
--with beautiful graphics--discussing the Holographic Model.

The Universe
as
a Hologram

The Universe as
a Hologram

"Author unknown"[Michael
Talbot]

Does Objective
Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

In
1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a
research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out
to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You
did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in
the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even
heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery
may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered
that under certain circumstances
subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.
It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always
seems to know what the other is doing. The
problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet
that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since
traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the
time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try
to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But
it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist
David Bohm, for example, believes
Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that
despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a
gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes
this startling assertion, one must first
understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional
photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object
to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a
second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and
the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams
commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks
like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the
developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a
three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The
three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable
characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and
then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain
the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided
again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller
but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs,
every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the
whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with
an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most
of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the
best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an
atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some
things in the universe may not lend
themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something
constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is
made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm
another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the
reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one
another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they
are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because
their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level
of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually
extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better
visualize what he means, Bohm offers the
following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine
also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your
knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television
cameras, one directed to the aquarium's front and the other directed at
its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume
that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all,
because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images
will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish,
you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship
between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different
but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always
faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the
situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be
instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not
the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely
what is going on between the subatomic
particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent
faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really
telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to,
a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the
aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as
separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their
reality.

Such particles are not separate
"parts", but facets of a deeper and
more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible
as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical
reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a
projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike
nature, such a universe would possess
other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of
subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of
reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The
electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the
subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart
that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything
interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to
categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the
universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of
nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even
time and space could no longer be
viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in
a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time
and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV
monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper
order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which
the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

This suggests that given
the proper tools it might even be
possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality
and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the
superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the
sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given
birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains
every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every
configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to
quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of
cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes
that we have no way of knowing what else
might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we
have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it,
perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond
which lies "an infinity of further development". Bohm is not the only
researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram.
Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford
neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the
holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the
holographic model by the puzzle of how
and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous
studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific
location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark
experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl
Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed
he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks
it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was
able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole
in every part" nature of memory storage. Then in the 1960s Pribram
encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the
explanation brain scientists had been looking
for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not
in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve
impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns
of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of
film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes
the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains how the
human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been
estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something
on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human
lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five
sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been
discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information
storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a
piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different
images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic
centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need
from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if
the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend
asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra",
you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and
cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations
like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into
your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the
human thinking process is that every piece of information seems
instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of
information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every
portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other
portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross- correlated
system.

The storage of memory is not the
only neurophysiological puzzle that
becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the
brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of
frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound
frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does
best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating
device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies
into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens
and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the
frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our
perceptions. An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain
uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's
theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher
Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the
holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the
fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their
heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli
discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.
Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a
recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an
almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains
mathematically construct "hard"
reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a
good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our
senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was
previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that
our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense
of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic
frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a
broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in
the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are
sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most
mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is
what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the
concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is
"there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain
is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this
blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what
becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to
exist. As the religions of the East have
long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we
may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this
too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers"
floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of
frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into
physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the
superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of
Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic
paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism,
it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers
believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has
arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some
mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even
establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

In
1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a
research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out
to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You
did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in
the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even
heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery
may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team
discovered that under certain circumstances
subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.
It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle
always seems to know what the other is doing. The
problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet
that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since
traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the
time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try
to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But
it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London
physicist David Bohm, for example, believes
Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that
despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a
gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm
makes this startling assertion, one must first
understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional
photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object
to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a
second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and
the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams
commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks
like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the
developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a
three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The
three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable
characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and
then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain
the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided
again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller
but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs,
every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the
whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with
an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most
of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the
best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an
atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that
some things in the universe may not lend
themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something
constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is
made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm
another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the
reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one
another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they
are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because
their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level
of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually
extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better
visualize what he means, Bohm offers the
following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine
also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your
knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television
cameras, one directed to the aquarium's front and the other directed at
its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume
that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all,
because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images
will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish,
you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship
between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different
but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always
faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the
situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be
instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not
the case.

This, says Bohm, is
precisely what is going on between the subatomic
particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent
faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really
telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to,
a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the
aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as
separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their
reality.

Such particles are not
separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and
more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible
as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical
reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a
projection, a hologram.

In addition to its
phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess
other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of
subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of
reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The
electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the
subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart
that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything
interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to
categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the
universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of
nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe,
even time and space could no longer be
viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in
a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time
and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV
monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper
order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which
the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

This suggests that
given the proper tools it might even be
possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality
and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. What else the
superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the
sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given
birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains
every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every
configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to
quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of
cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm
concedes that we have no way of knowing what else
might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we
have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it,
perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond
which lies "an infinity of further development". Bohm is not the only
researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram.
Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford
neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the
holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn
to the holographic model by the puzzle of how
and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous
studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific
location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark
experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl
Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed
he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks
it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was
able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole
in every part" nature of memory storage. Then in the 1960s Pribram
encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the
explanation brain scientists had been looking
for. Pribram believes memories are
encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns
of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that
patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a
piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram
believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains
how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It
has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize
something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the
average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information
contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been
discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information
storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a
piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different
images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic
centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need
from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if
the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend
asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra",
you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and
cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations
like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into
your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the
human thinking process is that every piece of information seems
instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of
information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every
portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other
portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross- correlated
system.

The storage of memory is
not the only neurophysiological puzzle that
becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the
brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of
frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound
frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does
best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating
device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies
into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens
and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the
frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our
perceptions. An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain
uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's
theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among
neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian
researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the
holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the
fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their
heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli
discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.
Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a
recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an
almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our
brains mathematically construct "hard"
reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a
good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our
senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was
previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that
our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense
of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic
frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a
broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in
the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are
sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most
mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is
what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the
concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is
"there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain
is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this
blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what
becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it
ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have
long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we
may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this
too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers"
floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of
frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into
physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the
superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of
Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic
paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism,
it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers
believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has
arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some
mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even
establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers,
including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many
para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms
of the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains
are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and
everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the
accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to
understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A'
to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to
understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular,
Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding
many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during
altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while
conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a
psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became
convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of
prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not
only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be
encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of
the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its
head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no
prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist
later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on
the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual
arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of
his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and
identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree
(research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the
movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences
frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be
accurate. Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only
puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients
who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious.
Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed
descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu
mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave
persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses
of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof
found the same range of phenomena manifested in
therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the
common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of
an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or
limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations
"transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a
branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely
to their study. Although Grof's newly founded Association of
Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of
like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of
psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able
to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena
they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the
holographic paradigm. As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually
part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every
other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and
region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is
able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have
transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm
also has implications for so-called hard
sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia
Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality
is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the
brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates
the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else
around us we interpret as physical. Such a turnabout in the way we view
biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine
and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed
by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the
body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear
that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current
medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of
disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn
effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial
new healing techniques such as visualization
may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images
are ultimately as real as "reality". Even visions and experiences
involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the
holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist
Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman
who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of
trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and
another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused
the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several
times in succession. Although current scientific understanding is
incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more
tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we
agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus
reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human
unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the
most profound implication of the holographic
paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not
commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the
beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no
limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What
we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it
any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the
power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda
during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our
birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the
reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most
fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic
universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to
be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined.
Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and
everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the
most haphazard events would express some underlying
symmetry. Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm
becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be
seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the
thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the
holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the
instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth
between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil
Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings
"indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of
reality."

Toby Johnson, PhD is
author of
eight books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, three gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality. In
addition to the novels featured
elsewhere in this web site, Johnson is author of IN SEARCH OF GOD IN
THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD and THE MYTH OF
THE GREAT SECRET (Revised edition): AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH
CAMPBELL.

Johnson's Lammy Award winning book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness was published in 2000. His Lammy-nominated
book GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was published by Alyson in 2003. Both books are
available now from Lethe
Press.